This invention relates to a three-dimensional display of medical images, and more particularly to a medical image diagnostic apparatus which provides images representing tissues forming internal organs in a living organism and those representing structures, such as blood vessels, in an easy-to-understand form suitable for diagnosis or medical treatment and to a medical image diagnostic apparatus which obtains quantitative parameters for a living organism on the basis of three-dimensional medical images.
In various diagnoses, it is important to grasp the vascular architecture in a living organism three-dimensionally. For instance, to grasp the nutritive blood vessels entering the hepatophyma in the lever is important in distinguishing between a malignant tumor and a benign tumor or judging the effect of treatment. When the renal function is evaluated, the state of the return of bloodstream in the kidney serves as an index.
Only three-dimensional information on the vascular architecture is often not enough to make an appropriate diagnosis. For instance, even when blood vessels are sensed and visualized near the hepatophyma and a three-dimensional image of the blood vessels is obtained, it is necessary to know whether the blood vessels have gone into the tumor to determine whether the blood vessels in the tumor are nutritive ones. When the image of the tumor is obtained only from the image of the blood vessels, the position of the tumor cannot be located, preventing diagnosis. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the bloodstream has flown back close to the surface of the kidney, unless it is known where the parenchyma or surface of the kidney is. That is, sufficient diagnosis cannot be made unless an image of parenchymatous internal organs whose positional relationship with an image of the bloodstream or the blood vessels is kept unchanged is obtained and displayed simultaneously.
In recent years, it has been getting important to quantitatively represent the amount of bloodstream and the abundance of blood vessels. The prior art, however, has encountered the problem of being unable to determine not only the calculation range of quantitative parameters from only an image of blood vessels but also quantitative parameters with sufficient reliability. It also has encountered the problem of having difficulty in determining sufficiently quantitative parameters.